Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 71

Call Entertainment: 1-313-222-6828 Sunday, September 21, 1997 Section Detroit 4frcc Stress INSIDE v. 6. Hey, Ray Rhino boxed set covers Ray Charles' remarkable career. Sound Judgment, Page 4G. The Week Ahead, Page 5G Movie Guide, Page 8G 4 v.

if f'O Jackie McLean will always be my sax hero I hen Jackie McLean was a kid, all he wanted was to sound like Charlie Parker. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to sound like 4" Alec Baldwin, left, stars with Anthony Hopkins in The Edge." Alec Baldwin has toned down bad-boy image by Terry Lawson Free Press Movie Writer Jackie McLean. Greatness will do that to people. Knock 'em upside the head with idolatry. Make 'em confuse the means for the end.

McLean figured it out soon enough, lavishing Parker with the most sincere homage one jazz musician can pay to another: He found his own voice. Inspired by Parker's bebop innovations, McLean developed an instantly recognizable identity on the alto saxophone. And for the better part of 40 years, McLean, an elder statesmen now at 66, has been one of the most vital musicians in jazz. I gave up the alto for the pen more than a decade ago, and my professional goal has always been to swing past my literary heroes. Yet whenever I pick up the horn, it is still McLean's bit f.

I lORONTO It was a moment most actors would savor for a decade. Sir Anthony Hopkins, roundly believed to be one of the finest actors of anyone's FRANCISCO KJOLSETHDetroit Free Press Joe Nederlander, 70, inside Detroit's Fisher Theatre, where "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk" opens Sept 30. It will mark the start of season No. 37 for the theater, which was begun by Nederlanders father. JOSEPH NEDERLANDER Mark STRYKER Music fell tersweet tone and blistering phrasing, that my inner ear tells my brain to duplicate.

So nobody is more thrilled than I that the Societie of the Culturally Concerned has chosen to honor McLean on Sept. 28 with a testimonial dinner and concert at the annual Detroit Jazz Heritage Reunion in It's a curious choice in a way. The society, a grassroots arts support organization, typically celebrates former Detroiters, and McLean, a New York QjJ Jackie McLean p.m. Sept. 28.

(Dinner at 3 p.m.; concert at 5.p.m.) International Banquet Conference Center, 400 Monroe $40, A limited number of concert-only tickets available for $15 1-313-864-2337 generation, in front of a star-studded audience at the premiere of his new outdoor-adventure-slash-suspense film "The Edge" at the Toronto Film Festival, declaring his costar Alec Baldwin "the finest actor I've ever worked with." Yet on the morning after, while basking in the compliment, is already assuming a more circumspect position. "We had dinner last night after the screening," says Baldwin. "And I reminded Tony that at the premiere of "Nixon," he called Jimmy Woods the best actor he had ever worked with, and that after "Legends of the Fall" he not only said Brad Pitt was the best actor he had worked with, but the most attractive man he had ever shared a picture with. So I was actually a little hurt. I thought I must have failed him in some way." This is not the sort of self-depreca' tion one might expect from Baldwin, who has managed to earn a media reputation for being arrogantly supeS rior and difficult.

Some of this is undoubtedly the lingering aftereffect of widely reported tantrums and telephoned throwing on the set of "The Marrying Man," in which he costarred with wife-to-be Kim Basinger. Some suits from the incident in which Bjjl dwin was charged with punching photographer who tried to take a picture of his baby daughter; more still comes from his self-appointment as Hollywood's adviser to WashiEgJ-ton on the Issues of Our Time. Etfefl Basinger jokingly refers to her op ionated husband as "The But anyone who has shared more than a sound bite with Baldwin knows that his opinions are as considered and his intelligence as genuine as his choice of roles is ofteH suspect "Alec is one of the few actors who is as brilliant off screen as he is on," says Hopkins, willing to heap praise on his costar even when they aren't in the same room. "If you had to make a movie in the wilderness with anyone, you would want it to be hin. He's such an incredibly bright and well-read OCCUPATION: Fisher Theatre and Broadway producer ASSESSMENT FROM AN OLD COMRADE-IN-ARMS: "Joe is a man of his word, totally.

Totally out of his mind, but a man of his word." --Emanuel Azenberg, Broadway producer. BORN: June 1, 1927, in Detroit. EDUCATION: Pontiac grade school and high school, one semester at Wayne State. PERSONAL Single. Formerly married to Van-ita Brown, Ricki Rose, Laurie Frederick.

CHILDREN: Zacbary, 18; John Joseph (JJ-), 33; stepdaughter Cathy, 45. Five grandchildren. RESIDENCES: Two-story colonial in Birmingham, getaway house in Great Harbour Cay in the Bahamas, Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan. FAVORITE DETROIT PRESENTATIONS: "Inherit the Wind" with Melvyn Douglas, "Fiddler on the Roof with Zero Mostel, "Mr. Roberts" with John Forsythe, "My Fair Lady" with Brian Aherne, "Gypsy," with Ethel Merman, "Hello, Dolly!" with Carol Channing BIGGEST POST-FISHER SUCCESS: "Fiddler on the Roof," which went to New York in 1964 and closed eight years later.

UNDYING MALAPROP FROM A MYOPIC SUPERSTAR: "And thanks to Jimmy and Joey Needle-heimer!" Elizabeth Taylor, at a Tony Awards show in the 1970s. TRADEMARK PREOCCUPATIONS: Family loyalty, horse racing, support payments, staying out of the papers, frugality. For 36 years, Joe Nederlander has been the most influential figure in Detroit theater On the eve of a new season, he reflects on his hits, his misses and his latest Broadway opener BY LAWRENCE 0 I a FREE PRESS THEATER WRITER The simplest question with Joe Nederlander turns into an all-day production. Ask him where he was born and what comes then is a symphony played by Spike Jones on cowbells and oogah horns of evasion, show business yaks and bad-boy fibs so bald they're funny. "I was born in a trunk" he's singing now, doing Judy Garland in "A Star Is Born" "in the Princess Theatre in Pocatello, Idaho! Who sang Garland! "Born? I have no idea.

I mean, what hospital. I was born in Detroit. I went all the way through school in Pontiac. We lived on Pine Lake. I went to Pontiac High.

Then I went to Harvard. On a scholarship!" Harvard? This is a new one. "Didn't Princeton? A sucker might go for that Princeton might explain at least one thing about the ebullient but intensely Please see NEDERLANDER, Page 6G native, has no true roots here beyond an occasional musical partnership with a Detroit-bred star like Donald Byrd. But McLean is also the kind of cultural warrior who inspires cult devotion. I first met pianist Kenn Cox, husband of Culturally Concerned founder and president Barbara J.

Cox, outside a Chicago jazz club where McLean was performing four years ago. I was first in line; Cox was second. No wonder the society broke with protocol to fete McLean. Part of McLean's allure is pedigree. He is, as author AB.

Spellman once wrote, one of the last of the original hip musicians. A child of the bebop era of the 1940s, he was given an alto on his 15th birthday. At 16, he studied with Bud Powell. At 17, he worked with Thelonious Monk. At 18, he hung out with Parker.

At 19, he gigged with Miles Davis. And at 20, he recorded his first jazz sides with Davis. Later, there were significant stints with Charles Mingus and Art Blakey and, beginning in 1959, a string of classic Blue Note LPs in which McLean collaborated with many of the key musicians of the era. Moreover, while many of his contemporaries turned a cold shoulder to the avant-garde in the early '60s, McLean bravely embraced the revolutionary free jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. McLean reinvented himself in those years, grafting expressionistic, modal forms onto his hard bop style and working with and mentoring young, vanguard musicians like Bobby Hutcher-son and Tony Williams.

Of course, I knew none of this when I bought my first McLean album at age 15 in a used record shop. All I knew was that the sound of McLean's horn stopped me cold. It was a searing, anguished wail that rode the sharp side of the pitch like a cowboy trying to tame a wild steer. It had nothing to do with the "proper" tone they taught in school, yet it was undeniably compelling, Please see McLEAN, Page 3G Latest work finds Philip Glass again challenging status quo By David Lyman Free Press Staff Writer 'Les Enfants Terribles' 'Get Tony Hopkins' The admiration is mutual: Though Baldwin had been interested in David Mamet's original script for The Edge," in which he plays a fashion photographer stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with an intellectual billionaire whose model wife he may or may not be having an affair with he wouldn't commit until Hopkins signed on. The role calls for a cerebral Yankee, a man of great integrity and ingenuity, shy, gifted.

I said, Tell you what: I'll do die picture if you can get Tony Thank God they took me literally." In short time, the men were off to Alberta, Canada, whose Rockies stood in for Alaska, with director Lee Tamahori Were of New Zealand. Baldwin isn't the sort of actor to dwell on the physical hardships of filmmaking, but this, he allows, was something else entirely. "I had never been on a shoot where you had to deliver equipment by helicopter," he says. "It was brutal. But even though it sounds like a Please see BALDWIN, Page 7G operatic mainstream, the 60-year-old composer has spent much of the last 45 years challenging the musical status quo.

It's not so much that he wants to reject the past, says Glass, who brings "Les Enfants Terribles" to the Music Hall Center for a single performance "Opera" is too staid a word for Philip Glass' "Les Enfants Terribles." It suggests an archaic musicdrama filled with tuneful, but centuries-old songs that regale audiences with simplistic tales of love and death. Or 8 p.m. Tuesday Music Hall Center 350 Madison, Detroit 1-313-963-2366, 10 o.m.-7:30 p.m. today, 104 Monday, 10-9 Tuesday I Tuesday. Rather, it's that he believes the best way to speak to a contemporary audience is to employ con-Please see GLASS, Page 2G perhaps love and be- -trayal; But rarely anything of dramatic complexity.

Although Glass has no particular antipathy for those grand entertainments that make up the "Les Enfants Terribles" is a musical stage work that makes strong use of dance..